The Quickening eBook

“Yes; I don’t know but what you have.
What’s puzzlin’ me right now, son, is
where you got it.”

Tom’s laugh was a tonic for sore nerves.

“I’d like to know what you’ve been
spending your good money on me for if it wasn’t
to give me a chance to get it. Do you think I’ve
been playing foot-ball all the time?”

“No; but—­well, Tom, the last I knew
of you, you was just a little shaver, spattin’
around barefooted in the dust o’ the Paradise
pike, and I can’t seem to climb up to where
you’re at now.”

Tom laughed again.

“You’ll come to it, after while.
I reckon I haven’t much more sense, in some
ways, than the little shaver had; but I’ve been
trying my level best to learn my trade. There
is only one thing about this tangle that is worrying
me: that’s the labor end of it.”

“We can get all the labor we want,” said
Caleb.

“Yes; but didn’t you write me that the
men were on strike?”

“I said the white miners were likely to make
trouble if they got hungry enough.”

“Was there any pay in arrears when you shut
down?”

“No. Farley wanted to scale the men, but
I fought him out o’ that.”

“Good! Then what are they kicking about?”

“Oh, because they’re out of a job.
There are always a lot of keen noses in a crowd the
size of ours, and they’ve smelled out some o’
the Farley doin’s. Of course, they don’t
believe in the cry of hard times; laborin’ men
are always the last to believe that.”

The train was tracking thunderously around the nose
of Lebanon, and Tom was looking out of the window
again, this time for the first glimpse of the Gordonia
chimney-stacks and the bounding hills of the home valley.

“That is where you will have to put your shoulder
into the collar with me, pappy,” he said.
“Most of the older men know me as a boy who has
grown up among them. When I spring my proposition,
they’ll howl, if only for that reason.”

But now Caleb was shaking his gray head more dubiously
than ever.

“You won’t get any help from the men,
Buddy, more ’n what you pay for. You know
the whites—­Welshmen, Cornishmen, and a good
sprinklin’ o’ ‘huckleberries.’
And the blacks don’t count, one way or the other.”

The engineer of the accommodation had whistled for
Gordonia, and Tom was gathering his dunnage.

“Our scramble is going to depend very largely
on the outcome of the meeting which I’m going
to ask you to call for say, two o’clock this
afternoon on the floor of the foundry building,”
he said. “Will you stay in town and get
the men together, while I go home and see mother and
shape up my talk?”

Caleb Gordon acquiesced, glad of a chance to have
somewhat to do. And so, in the very beginning
of things, it was the son and not the father who took
the helm of the tempest-driven ship.